Efficient Cooling Tower Demolition and Crossflow Tower Construction
Challenge
Demolish two existing wood six-cell cooling towers and complete eight of 12 cells in two new fiberglass cooling towers within a tight six-week outage window.
Solution
Midwest teamed up with Precision Cooling Towers, a contractor out of Henderson, Kentucky to tackle this project.
Midwest provided engineering, design, drafting, manufacturing, material, and field assistance. Precision provided the labor to build the towers.
Although Precision was providing the labor, Midwest provided a field advisor/consultant to provide expertise in the construction of our fiberglass towers.
Midwest was chosen for the job because of our expertise in the new concept of fiberglass crossflow cooling towers.
The plant had a scheduled outage for six weeks. Four of the six cells on each tower (8 of 12 total) had to be operational at the end of the six-week outage.
Although the schedule for the six-week outage was very aggressive, the deadline was met. The entire external structure and eight of 12 cells were completed on time.
Successful completion of this project was possible due to extensive planning.
The bent lines were assembled on site prior to the outage. This allowed us to complete the demolition and erect both structures 10 days after the outage started. 110 bent lines were stood in seven days (55 per tower).
The assembly of the fiberglass bent lines was very efficient. Unlike a wood tower, the columns can be one piece instead of two or three pieces. This reduces the amount of time and material it takes to put a bent line together
The utility customer was very pleased with the finished project.
